With his remarkable antennae for all that was potentially controversial, however, Stieglitz quickly grasped the significance of European modern art. Before he was on the ship back to New York, he had expanded his goals, and the startling pictures and sculpture he had seen in Paris would be shown at 291. Once again, he would be battling against the conservatives and the academies, continuing his “revolt against the autocracy of convention.” His first strike was on behalf of Rodin.
On January 2, 1908, Stieglitz launched the exhibition of Rodin’s erotic watercolors. He knew they were guaranteed to shock most visitors to the gallery, but, to insure maximum outrage, in the catalogue he reprinted a portion of Arthur Symons’s essay: “She turns upon herself in a hundred attitudes,” he wrote, “turning always upon the central pivot of the sex.”9 The watercolors were not only titillating, they were unlike anything yet ever seen in New York, the outline of female shapes in pencil and washed with tones of fleshy peach or shadowy blue.
William Merritt Chase, who saw himself as liberal and modern, was so incensed by the pictures that he vowed never to visit 291 again. His students, including Georgia O’Keeffe, were sent to see the show simply to discover what they should avoid. One instructor told O’Keeffe that “he didn’t know whether Rodin was fooling Stieglitz and America too by sending over such a ridiculous group of drawings to be shown here or maybe Stieglitz knew what he was about and had his tongue in his cheek trying to see what nonsense he could put over on the American public.”10
His own best customer, Stieglitz bought many of the Rodin watercolors. He bought works, too, from the exhibition later that year of Matisse, a show that attracted four thousand visitors. Stieglitz saw these simple line renderings of reclining nude women as “new ideas” by “a very anarchist,” which led to “many heated controversies.” Critics dismissed the Matisse show as “indecent.”
During the first two years of 291, Stieglitz and Steichen attempted to balance shows that were guaranteed to cause controversy with tamer fare such as the 1908 exhibition by Willi Geiger, a German painter who had studied with Franz von Stuck, or the theater designs of Gordon Craig. In part, this was because Stieglitz did not initially understand the more radical European art, and even Steichen, who was better informed, had his reservations. He felt that 291 should alternate between “understandable” art, like that of Craig, and “art that causes as much trouble as waving a red rag in front of a bull. As for the red rag I am sure Picasso would fill the bill if I can get them but he is a crazy galloot,” Steichen wrote to Stieglitz.11
Two days after the opening of the Rodin show, the secretary of the Camera Club sent Stieglitz a letter requesting his resignation and blaming him for the decline in club membership. Stieglitz sued in response, and on March 10, he was reinstated as a life member. Immediately, he dropped his suit and submitted his resignation, which was accepted.12
Without the dues from the Photo-Secessionists, however, Stieglitz needed backers to support 291. In 1907, he had met Agnes Ernst, a beautiful blond graduate of Barnard who was working for the New York Morning Sun. She interviewed him about the Rodin show and came to the conclusion that 291 represented the freedom from convention that she had been seeking. After a stint in Paris studying art, she returned in 1909 to marry financier Eugene Meyer. Her connection to Stieglitz was reinforced by the fact that Eugene’s sister Aline had married Emmy’s cousin Charles J. Liebman the year before. Both Aline Liebman and Agnes Ernst Meyer became important patrons of 291. Eugene Meyer freely offered investment advice to the artists, which Steichen followed, eventually developing substantial financial independence. Stieglitz, typically, refused such counsel and continued to go into debt; by 1912, he had to borrow money from his brother-in-law Obermeyer.
Stieglitz’s principal backer was Paul Burty Haviland, whose French father was director of the family firm, Limoges, manufacturers of fine porcelain for three centuries. His mother was the daughter of French art critic Philippe Burty, a champion of the Impressionists. After finishing his studies at the University of Paris, Haviland was sent to Harvard to improve his English and make contacts. He had moved to New York as a representative of the family business but was bored by the city’s conservative cultural life until he came to the Rodin show and bought several drawings.
Stieglitz had balked at renewing the gallery lease due to a 100 percent rent increase. In the spring of 1909, Haviland signed a three-year lease for smaller rooms at 293 Fifth Avenue for $500 a year. Since the two buildings used the same entrance the gallery continued to operate as 291. Haviland was drafted into every aspect of the operation—conducting sales, acting as associate editor of Camera Work, and writing a regular column for the magazine.
In addition to showing Steichen’s choices from Paris, 291 showed Marius de Zayas, an aristocratic Mexican whose family published newspapers and had fled to the States in 1907 after having their property seized during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. De Zayas’s caricatures of artists and society figures for the New York Evening World helped him secure a reputation. For six months in 1910, lines of visitors waited to get into 291 to see his show Boulevardiers. On a large wooden platform, he arranged one hundred free-standing cardboard caricatures of New York’s prominent residents strolling along Fifth Avenue in front of the Plaza Hotel.
That year, after traveling to Paris, de Zayas slowly took over from Steichen, who had moved with his family to the village of Voulangis, in recommending artists to be shown at 291, including Picasso. Their shared language allowed him to conduct an in-depth interview with Picasso, which was published in the April-July issue of Camera Work. From his 1911 show at 291, Stieglitz purchased Picasso’s Cubist drawing Standing Female Figure, referring to it as “an intellectual cocktail.”
On May 24, 1909, Stieglitz’s father died of kidney ailments. Hedwig moved to an apartment at 14 East Sixtieth Street in a building that had been erected on the site of their demolished brownstone. Alfred inherited ten thousand dollars from his father, and though he vowed never to touch the capital, he siphoned off some seven hundred dollars a year of the principal to maintain the gallery.
That summer, Stieglitz returned to Europe with Emmy, Kitty, and her governess, eager to meet more of the artists, collectors, and dealers who had colonized the Left Bank of Paris. He visited Rodin at his studio in Meudon. He saw Michael and Sarah Stein’s collection of Matisses; Gertrude and Leo Stein’s collection of Cézannes and Picassos. Leo lectured him on the importance of Cubism while his sister sat quietly nearby. Three years later, Stieglitz was the first American to publish Gertrude Stein’s idiosyncratic writing on her friendships with Matisse and Picasso in Camera Work.
Through Steichen, Stieglitz met the pioneering art dealer Ambroise Vollard and the American artist John Marin, whose Cubist watercolors had been shown at 291 the previous April. “From the moment I first saw Marin’s work I felt, ‘Here is something full of delight,’” Stieglitz recalled. After spending time with the artist, seeing his latest work, he eagerly committed to another show. After Marin moved back to the United States, he became one of Stieglitz’s closest friends.
By the time Stieglitz returned to New York that fall, he had developed a more complex understanding of modern art. During the 1911 show of Cézanne’s lithographs made after his painting The Bathers, Stieglitz told the New York press that “without the understanding of Cezanne . . . it is impossible for anyone to grasp, even faintly, much that is going on in the art world today.”
The goal of showing modern art at 291 was meant to be educational, and no one learned more than Stieglitz himself. He came to see modern art as a metaphor for individual liberation. An artist’s personal evolution meant as much to him as the resultant works of art. His friend de Zayas mused, “He showed it not only for what it was but for what it could be for the individual to find his own real self. . . . Modern art was to most incomprehensible; for that reason it was the best tool to make people understand themselves.”13
He perceived the artist
ic process as a spiritual journey of self-expression, and he saw his gallery as a laboratory for aesthetic research and his role as shamanistic. Rejecting suggestions that the gallery be run as a business, he was notorious for conducting himself like anything but an art dealer. “If he thought they wanted to buy just because they had money, he might double the price of a painting,” said his long-time secretary, Marie Rapp Boursault. “If someone else came in and was just crazy about something, and had nothing else in mind, he would let them have it for half-price!”14
Despite such unconventional practices, or maybe because of them, artists loved showing at 291. Over the next few years, Stieglitz showed the work of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Rousseau, and Francis Picabia, as well as Picasso, Cézanne, and Matisse. After 1913, he took on the more adventuresome American moderns—Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Paul Strand.
As a result of his talks with the artists and collectors, between 1909 and 1913 he reversed his earlier position on pictorialism and began to argue that photography should not be indebted to painting. Photography should find a mission as compelling as that facing modern painters and sculptors. After Cézanne and Picasso, what was to be the role of art? What was the significance of representation?
Despite Stieglitz’s sincere interest in enhancing the position of photography by establishing a dialogue with the other arts, the Photo-Secessionists felt rejected by his shift in position. Camera Work’s circulation dropped from 1,000 in 1903 to 304 in 1912. In 1910, Stieglitz attempted to placate the disgruntled Photo-Secessionists by including their work in a comprehensive exhibition at Buffalo’s Albright Knox Gallery. His goal of seeing photography accepted as fine art was met when the institution bought twelve of the prints for its collection, one of the first museums to make such a commitment. Stieglitz felt his work for that cause was complete.15
Stieglitz, who continued to see his wife as the epitome of the conservative forces, said, “Even Mrs. Stieglitz who saw it finally realizes that something has happened.” He added dryly, “It was all a revelation to her!”16
V
After the paradisiacal summer of 1908 at Lake George, Georgia O’Keeffe could not afford to return to the Art Students League with her classmates. Instead, she went back to Williamsburg, where her family was living off of their savings. Her parents had tried to shield her from the reality of their shifting fortunes, but it was impossible to continue the charade. The tiny economy of Williamsburg was suffering a depression. One local joked, “There was about fifteen dollars that would start out on Monday morning and everybody in town would get their hands on it and it would get back on Saturday night to the same fellow that had started it.”1 Frank O’Keeffe could not manage to get his hands on those fifteen dollars.
The previous summer, he had embarked upon his most desperate business venture. Having bought bags of discounted concrete from the abandoned construction site for a road to Jamestown, he set up a work site near the railroad tracks. With his sons, he mixed the concrete with clamshells from the river and poured it into molds to make building blocks, then tried to sell them through an ad in the local paper. When the southerners stuck to their preference for red brick and clapboard, he used the blocks to build a two-story house with a portico on the strip of land that he still owned. One magazine writer called it “the ugliest building in town.”
Although O’Keeffe rarely got along with her mother, she realized that this was hardly the time for complaints. That summer in Williamsburg was spent dusting and housekeeping, cooking for her family and the table boarders, and minding her siblings. “It finally got so at home I did what my mother wanted and when I was away I did as I pleased,” she said.2 After a couple of months, O’Keeffe was receiving the attentions of the young local minister, Tuck Lawrence, but he was no match for Dannenberg, her man from the Far West.
There were no longer any funds to educate the girls, though sixteen-year-old Alexius continued at the Academy of the College of William and Mary. Frank grew morose and silent. “He is having hard luck these days but never says much because he doesn’t like to own up to it, even to himself,” O’Keeffe wrote to her former roommate, explaining why she could not continue at the League. “When I think of the fight to live up there it seems like this is the place for a girl,” she added, resignedly. “It doesn’t seem like she ought to be bumping around New York alone.
“My private opinion is that his money is just going down the line and that the wisest thing for Pats to do is wake up,” she continued. “I am going to get busy and see if I can do anything if I work regularly.”3
Around the time that O’Keeffe was at the League, a student had written to her mother to describe her classmates: “Hundreds of girls who come up because it is the fad, work in the morning and go to the artistic teas in the afternoon. Poor ones who work in order to teach, to illustrate or advertise. Some who work as you say just to fill up the space before the marrying time arrives. . . .”4
Despite her promise and her awards, O’Keeffe had become one of the “poor ones who work in order to teach, illustrate or advertise.” Two days before her twenty-first birthday, O’Keeffe took the train to Chicago to look for work to help support her family. Without a teaching certificate, commercial art seemed her best option. She again took her room with her Aunt Ollie and Uncle Charlie but there was now less privacy than before, since the apartment was being shared with Aunt Lola as well.
In the expansive, fast-paced business of advertising, O’Keeffe found freelance work at various agencies drawing lace and embroidery for promotions in newspapers and magazines. Family lore credits her with the logo design for Little Dutch Girl cleanser. If true, the artist never admitted it. At best, O’Keeffe felt conflicted about doing illustration, though she developed a strong graphic sensibility that came to pervade and enhance the appearance of her mature painting.
In 1908, most working women did not enjoy grand career goals. Menial employment was the lot of the lower middle classes or women in reduced circumstances like O’Keeffe. They were simply trying to survive. It was grueling, demeaning, and not particularly lucrative. Paid by the piece, O’Keeffe had little time or energy for her own painting. “There seemed no time to think of anything else,” she admitted.5
For the next two years, she toiled away, but she was miserable. “Painting remained her passion, but it was all or nothing,” one friend recalled. “Since she could not devote herself to it, she never touched a brush, could not bear the smell of paint or turpentine because of the emotions they aroused.”6
Around that time in America, illustration was the preferred part-time employment of many a talented modern artist, including John Sloan and others associated with The Eight, many of whom also taught at the League. Edward Hopper supported himself as an illustrator for more than a decade, as did Arthur Dove, later a great friend of and influence on O’Keeffe. He was struggling to balance his illustration work for magazines like Century and Cosmopolitan with his dedication to painting. All of these artists were older than O’Keeffe and more established in their fine art pursuits, but she could not accept the notion of illustration as a means to an end. Decades later, she tried to gloss over the difficulty of the Chicago years, presenting this time away from her own painting as a gesture of rebellion against the prevalent academic style of art. In her autobiography, she wrote, “I began to realize that a lot of people had done this same kind of painting before I came along. It had been done and I didn’t think I could do any better. It would have been just futile for me, so I stopped painting for quite a while.”7
If she could have afforded another term at the League, undoubtedly she would have capitalized on the momentum of her experience at Amitola and the award given to her by Chase. Seventy years after the fact, she colored her account of events out of a lingering shame. Despite O’Keeffe’s fabled resilience, this unexpected bout of financial insecurity left deep scars.
O’Keeffe and her sisters were raised to expect a life of comparativ
e ease. They had grown up with hired help and the notion that they would remain in the educated middle classes. As girls, they were groomed in art and music in part to become the sort who might attract respectable husbands. After such an upbringing, O’Keeffe felt humiliated riding the noisy, crowded El to an office in the Loop and made no effort to contact acquaintances from her days at the Art Institute. She endured the work for two years until, exhausted, she contracted a case of measles that weakened her eyesight. In 1910, she returned to Williamsburg to recover.
As though caught in a novel with multiple tragic twists of fate, O’Keeffe arrived home to find her father living alone in the concrete block house. Her mother had been diagnosed with the first stages of tuberculosis and moved with her children to Charlottesville. Nestled in the arms of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the air there was brisk and dry compared to the coastal climate of Williamsburg. If her disease progressed, she was reassured by the proximity of the Blue Ridge Sanatorium.
O’Keeffe, however, remained in Williamsburg to recover from her own illness and keep house for her father. Unable to sell what neighbors called his “stone monstrosity,” her father could not find even menial employment. He was overcome by the cruel irony that after traveling thousands of miles across the country and losing his fortune, he and his family still had not outdistanced the dreaded tuberculosis.
Dannenberg, O’Keeffe’s flame from the League, wrote promising to visit Williamsburg, making careless intimations that he might take her to Paris. That fall, he teased, “Wish I could take you with me. It is not so very impossible so don’t laugh.”8
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